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The 43-year-old Raptors GM reaches back to his days in Europe. He was on a team in Belgium’s second division. They were in a playoff against another, markedly less talented squad. They’d lost the first two games.

Ujiri was travelling between cities with a Congolese teammate and a couple of journalists. One journalist put that question to Ujiri’s teammate, “Do you feel pressure?”

“He started laughing and he looked at me. He said, ‘I have an uncle in the Congo . . . ’ — this was during the war — ‘. . . His wife just died, probably of AIDS. He has eight children. The youngest is six months. He has no job. They all live in one room. He has no hope. He doesn’t know how he’s going to feed them tomorrow. That’s pressure.’ ”

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And what did the journalist say to that?

Ujiri smiles ruefully: “He was very quiet.”

“You take that in, and then you realize . . . I’ve never once gone into anything in this job and felt pressure. That’s the honest truth.”

Feted as the NBA’s top executive after years spent scrabbling, Ujiri has arrived back at the league’s longest-running renovation. Every few years, the Raptors hire a new contractor. Every few years, he starts by tearing down all the work done by his predecessor.

Ujiri’s not going to do that. His watchword is patience. It’s an NBA sin he transubstantiated into a virtue by out-staring the New York Knicks in the Carmelo Anthony trade, extracting real value from a want-away star. His signature move has become his signature trait.

There’s little to liken him to one of his many mentors, Bryan Colangelo. Both are enormously sharp dressers. End of list.

Colangelo fairly pulsated with pent-up energy. There are legendary stories of how staffers had to wrestle the phone off him on trade deadline day to stop him from making a deal, just for the sake of making one.

There is a watchful stillness to Ujiri. Unlike Colangelo, he’s listening when people talk, rather than waiting his turn.

Little has changed about the team he inherited. He off-loaded Colangelo’s Rosebud in Andrea Bargnani (‘Did you consider keeping him?’ “No,” says Ujiri).

The major shift comes on the bench, where most of coach Dwane Casey’s assistants — many widely perceived as Colangelo’s men rather than Casey’s — have been replaced.

“I told him when I arrived, ‘Coach, there’s no snitch here. There’s no one who’s going to come back and tell me anything. There’s only one snitch, and he’s standing here in front of you. If I have anything to say, I am going to come and say it to you myself.”

This is a fresh start for both men. In the summer, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban put out feelers, wondering if Casey could be released from his deal and allowed to return to Dallas. In brushing back that attempt, MLSE quietly committed itself to the Ujiri/Casey pairing.

Now, a week from the start of training camp, Ujiri’s done stirring. He’s going to watch the drink settle.

“Rather than make some crazy decisions, we want to see what we have,” Ujiri says. “We’re not signing players on long term deals now. We’re going to . . . see how we start off the season and go from there. I know it sounds very simple, but I think right now simple is best for us.”

There is no talk of a tank in order to take a long shot at Andrew Wiggins, or as Ujiri elliptically refers to him, “the kid from Kansas.” There are no playoff promises.

For now, the marching orders are march until we tell you to stop. Once again, it starts out uphill. The Raptors face 19 road games in their first 34. The stretch includes nine contests against teams that made last year’s conference finals. You hope for the best, but a realist is expecting something worse.

In the wider view, every army on the move needs a destination. It’s put to Ujiri that the 2016 all-star game — a moment MLSE hopes to use in order to re-announce the franchise to the league — is an obvious target.

“I think it has to be around that time that you at least see what the picture is going to look like. Listen, we’re not trying to buy time here. We have to see what we have and advance from there. But yes, I like that timeframe, where you should at least know that your team is emerging.”

If the tank’s out, is it possible to build a winner without top-five picks?

“Tough,” Ujiri says. “Also possible, but it’s tough.”

This is the future. Hamstrung by existing deals pushing against the cap ceiling, Ujiri is wrestling with the right now. Make a plan, take a step, reassess, make a new plan.

Like just about everybody who has his job, people tell stories about his work rate. He doesn’t sleep much. He’s taken his father’s habit of getting up around 5 a.m. to begin the workday by reading.

But tinting all that is a wonderfully present sense of good fortune, of pausing to realize how far he’s come — from the beyond the outer edge to the very middle of it. He’s just bought a house in Lawrence Park. He is a Nigerian-Kenyan with a British passport. He’s married to a Guinean-Sierra Leonean with American citizenship. In December, they’ll have a child with pan-African roots, but a Canadian by birth. The idea of the global becoming the local in so personal a way delights him.

In attempting to explain why he chose a losing program in Toronto rather than a winning one in Denver, Ujiri shifts in his seat, thinking hard about how he’s going to put this.

“I left a good team. And yes, there was money. People say money is a good driver. From where I’ve come from, I was being offered something very good (in Denver) as well. It’s not like I was going to stay there and starve. I left that to come here because of this.”

Ujiri leans back and points for a lingering moment at his heart.

“I always imagined that if we figured it out in this place, it would be unbelievable. It would be remarkable.”

Can you say exactly why this franchise has failed so often?

“Sometimes it’s luck,” Ujiri says. “Everybody works hard, I know. Everybody makes mistakes. But here, with the opportunity that has been given to me, I feel like I can’t fail. I don’t fear, but in my mind that’s the way I go into it. Look at how far I’ve come. Now I have a responsibility to do well.”

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